PASSING HANDS: Peter Dinklage gets a new gig as Hand of the King this season on “Game of Thrones.” Photo: Helen Sloan

If you haven’t watched Season 1 of HBO’s brilliant, if complicated, “Game of Thrones” and you don’t have time to catch up before Season 2 starts on Sunday, I will try to help you out.

Why? Because even though I get so confused my head feels like it’s going to explode, “Game of Thrones” is brainy, good fun.

It is, in fact, what “Rome” should have been but wasn’t — epic.

We want stories of kings and would-be kings, not out-of-work soldiers.

OK. Ready? There are five kings and seven kingdoms, a wall where the world’s best-looking celibate men live, three new baby dragons, scores of really fit naked people having sex and abstaining, gratuitous frontal and backal nudity, breasts galore, much killing, really severe weather, seasons that last for years, big hairdos, one little Hand of the King and much fur.

There are good kings, not-so-good kings and one really rotten, evil kid king named Joffrey, the product of the most rotten and evil of all practices — incest.

And therein lies the big problem as we enter Season 2 — or the Season of the White Raven, as they say on the show.

Rotten Joffrey believes he’s the legit heir of the dead good King Robert Baratheon (who has many bastard children), but Joffrey is actually the product of the coupling of his mother — power broker Cersei Lannister — and her brother Jaime.

In fact, this loving sister and brother have three lovely kids together. Nice.

In Season 1, Cersei’s husband, King Robert Baratheon, met his suspicious and untimely death, followed shortly after by the murder of the Hand of the King, Lord of Winterfell.

With those two out of the way, illegitimate Joffrey ascended to the throne.

So, when the new season opens, we have five kings power-brokering among the seven kingdoms, and war is afoot.

The Iron Throne, formerly held by the Baratheons and now under control of the Lannister clan, is being assaulted on many fronts as the Starks seek revenge for the murder of their father, Lord Winterfell; and blonde and beautiful Daenerys Targaryen is shoring up her area, even though she is traversing the barren and terrible desert and her people are starving to death and her horses are dropping like flies.

Meanwhile, the Starks’ two daughters are in trouble — one is held as the prisoner/fiancée of Joffrey, and the other is hiding out as a boy en route to the wall of celibate men.

The only reasonable Lannister — the whoring, drinking Tyrion, who was named the new Hand of the King — is trying to convince Joffrey to tame his excesses (which he should know about better than anyone) in order to become a leader.

To all this mad excess enters mysterious, Melisandre, a priestess, who is turning folks against polytheism and toward one God — with whom she happens to have a personal relationship.

Oh, then there are the wildings and about 50 other plots.

I swear, it would be easier to seat the media moguls at Michael’s every day than to figure out just who the hell has the upper hand on “Thrones.”